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Christmas break was glorious, if a bit too short. After about a week of waking up at a civilized hour, my brain started to snap back to its original shape and I started to feel human again. (Idea for the betterment of human civilization: move the start of the workday to, oh, ten-ish. You're welcome.) The kids were astonishingly well-behaved, TW made the house look fantastic, and we did lots of family time. Even the blogging break was welcome, as the idea well was running dangerously low. (And thanks to everyone for their gracious holiday emails!)

Economists make many assumptions in our efforts to mathematically model the world. Some of these assumptions instantly make sense to everyone. The idea that family members work together so as to maximize the welfare of the family unit is one such example. Other assumptions, however, require more of a leap of faith. For example, we often assume that lending markets are such that people can borrow against future income increases to pay for education.

With the new year, we tell ourselves the story of a year. The story of last year. The story of the year to come.
The storyteller, Doris Lessing says in her Nobel speech, "will [always] be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed."

A front-page article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal goes into some detail about how Dell Computer's announcement earlier this year that it had achieved carbon neutrality didn't mean as much as many folks might have presumed. (I highly doubt that the negative write-up had anything to do with today's article about a Dell management shakeup, but still ...).

“When at a loss how to go on, cough,” says an ancient Greek proverb. Or so claims 10,000 Jokes, Toasts and Stories: A Mammoth Encyclopedia of Wit and Humor (Doubleday, 1939, last updated 1965), one of several toasting anthologies I consulted at my local library in preparation for your party tonight. Ancient foxed tomes like these, and those that count as new ( Toasts, Delacorte, 1981) are one of many reasons bookstores will never supplant the delight of libraries.

The MLA convention in San Francisco this year is spread out over two hotels, one on either side of Market Street, near Union Square and all the good downtown shopping. Conference attendees rushing from one hotel to the other for interviews or panels get quizzical looks from the crush of slow-moving post-holiday shoppers taking advantage of sales; why would you look so tense on a Sunday afternoon when there are such bargains to be found? They are tense because they are hunting for scarce jobs, presenting their research and, perhaps, having their children cared for by strangers.

The panel titled "Negotiating Family and Graduate Studies", sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession, ranged far beyond its named topic, as well it should. Graduate students aspire to become professors in higher education, after all, and so it only makes sense to consider how the family issues facing graduate students change -- or not -- when they become faculty. The three presenters offered personal, statistical, and theoretical talks which were by turns enraging, depressing, inspiring and moving.

My first San Francisco MLA, I didn't get any closer to the convention than the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel. I was living in San Francisco and had just been accepted to UC Berkeley's PhD program in Comparative Literature. I wasn’t such an overachiever that I wanted to attend a professional conference before joining the profession, but my sister Libby, a grad student at UCLA (and now one of the Mama, PhD bloggers), was on the market, looking for a job teaching English literature. I offered to babysit for my two year-old niece so that Libby could get some sleep before her interviews.

For those interviewing at MLA this year, here are links to a couple of dispatches I did for McSweeney's on the conference two years ago.
In which my family and I drive to the conference.
In which I suffer in the wait for news.
Good luck to each of you!

I'm not sure when or why December 26 became Boxing Day but it always has been, at least in my experience. It's always been the day we gave presents to the postal carrier, and the newspaper delivery person, and tradespeople whom the family frequented and depended upon. Nothing like the presents key people in the auto trade or the financial services trade gave themselves, of course, but tokens of appreciation nonetheless.
This Boxing Day, though, I was struck by the juxtaposition of two logically unrelated bits of information.